Facebook discontinues facial recognition feature, plans to delete information on over 1 billion people

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Facebook (Meta) has announced that it is discontinuing its facial recognition feature and will be deleting the information of over 1 billion people.

https:// about.fb.com/news/2021/11/update-on-use-of-face-recognition/

In a few weeks, we will be shutting down Facebook’s facial recognition system as part of a company-wide effort to limit the use of facial recognition in our products. People who have allowed facial recognition to be set up will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos, and we will remove the facial recognition template that was used to identify them.

This will be one of the biggest changes in the use of facial recognition in the history of facial recognition technology; over a third of Facebook’s daily active users are using our facial recognition settings and are ready to use facial recognition. The removal of this facial recognition setting will result in the removal of facial recognition templates for over a billion individuals.

Facebook (a Meta company) has been using vast amounts of data to provide features that automatically recognize people in photos and videos. The privacy implications of these features have also been the subject of legal challenges, including a class action lawsuit under Illinois’ biometric privacy law.

This deletion of data from the facial recognition feature has been met with surprise and delight from privacy advocates and researchers.

Several companies have halted some of their facial recognition efforts in response to public outcry, and in May 2021, Amazon announced that it would indefinitely extend its ban on the use of facial recognition systems by police. Amazon first announced the ban after selling facial recognition products to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the desegregation protests in the summer of 2020 and as the Trump administration cracked down on immigration.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-amazon-extends-moratorium-police-use- facial-recognition-software-2021-05-18/

Studies have shown that facial recognition technology is less accurate at identifying people with darker skin tones, which has already led to reports of black people being arrested and imprisoned due to misidentification.

The decision to withdraw facial recognition from Facebook was based on greater public concern and the lack of clear regulatory guidance.

While they are discontinuing significant implementation of facial recognition technology, they will continue to consider using it for more limited use cases, such as unlocking accounts.

The elimination of the facial recognition feature is “a move away from company-wide broad-based personal authentication to more narrowly focused personal authentication,” the blog post says.

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